Been putting it off for far too long, today was the day to bring the machine down, take out the modem obsolesced by the wireless highspeed, and install the ilink/firewire card. This is the story of that adventure:
First off, plug in the card, restart the machine, no smoke. Good sign, so I plug in the camera, a Sony Digital8 700x SteadyShot. Ok, on the Mandrake menu is bcast2000, so for fun, I hit it, and for the record, nothing happens. Two instances of bcast2000 in the process table, but nothing opens. So I kill it. Plan B: Google the blighter.
Google on "linux digital video" sends me to Kino. Kino wants libdv and apparently didn't like Mandrake's libdv2, so I download and install libdv from the sf site, but Kino's config still won't accept the libdv/dv.h that is clearly there in /usr/include. There's another ominous google hit, a mailing list post of someone who had gone this way before, but ran into dead silence when they asked if there were any drivers for Sony handicams ... and sure enough, following his process, a modprobe of the ohci1394 shows
/etc/hotplug/ieee1394.agent: ... no drivers for IEEE1394 product 0x080046/0x00a02d/0x010001
Y'know that sinking feeling you get when you've spent a lot of money on a "standards based" device and then discover you're locked out of it because you won't play the Redmond game? That's the feeling. I wrote to the author, since his post was 6 months ago, and trod on ...
kino's sister prog, dvgrab, wants raw1394 installed, and on this one, for the first time, there's a urpmi match: libraw1394_5-0.9.0-1mdk.i586 -- I install it with the devel RPM as well; config now wants libquicktime (not found in urpmi) and once again, it doesn't find the /usr/include/libdv/dv.h include file (locate finds it no problem), but dvgrab doesn't bomb on that, it just says the AVI's would be better if it had it. Right now, I'd be happy with a first light so I trod on and hit make.
Make exits ... with a huge string of syntax errors in /usr/include/libdv/*.h -- syntax errors, guint32 used as a type but not defined ... ok, let's shelve that for a moment. I see there's an option to use libavc1934 instead, and it builds and installs without incident, so ...
I install that, kino still fails because of dv.h, so I reinstall that from the sf sources and now dvgrab installs. Cool. Give it a shot ...
raw1394 - couldn't get handle: No such file or directory This error usually means that the ieee1394 driver is not loaded or that /dev/raw1394 does not exist.
Well, the driver is loaded, but yes, the /dev doesn't. I have video1394, but not the raw, so mknod /dev/raw1394 c 171 0, and it does exist, but dvgrab gives the same error.
I can see this is going to be a long night.